| Michael Yacavone |
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Are there a significant number of game developers making money on Android? All that market share, but is any money flowing?
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| Harry Fields |
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Google is in a precarious situation. They need to somehow wrestle control of their O/S back from the manufacturers and carriers without alienating them. The absolutely ludicrous fragmentation of kernel and wrapper distribution makes Android development much more painful than it should be. Or maybe it's the bug-squishing that's more painful than the actual development :D Either way, they need to "platform-ize" Android desperately.
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| Rey Samonte |
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@Michael...I'd like to know the answer to this question myself!
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| James Coote |
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My own experience says that there are plenty of people making money off of android games, but it throws up many more challenges than developing for iOS.
The sheer number of apps and the 'wild' marketplace means you really can't just chuck a quality app out there and expect it to succeed. There's also the issue of piracy. Moreover, I, like a lot of android users chose android because it is cheap. That doesn't bode well when it comes to trying to charge people for apps. There are some farily shocking statistics for android paid-for apps (something like 80% have <100 downloads). One piad-for app made from android and iOS, the developers made ~$60k. Downloads were 3:2 for apple (so 40% of downloads were android). However of the $60k, <1% of that was from android. The other 99% from apple The alternative is in-app billing, which has only recently been supported by the android market. The result is (especially for games) there are about half a dozen different 3rd party platforms. Papaya and Ngmoco Mobage being two examples, but there are also a number of competing API's from telco's. Amazon are in closed beta for in-app billing through their own market. For an android games dev like me, it presents a myriad of options. I can't go with papaya for example, because I've already effectively written my own game engine. Each of the other options are going to miss some people (the telco's particularly where a customer in the UK, where I am, has to be on O2 for one API to work and Vodaphone for another). |
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More: Smartphone/Tablet, Business/Marketing